Top 10 SEO mistakes to avoid with WordPress

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that WordPress powers the internet, as more than one in four websites are built using its easy templates and effortless dashboard. What’s more, it is one of the best platform’s for boosting your Google ranking with SEO tools and techniques too.

However, that doesn’t mean to say every website built with WordPress will automatically achieve a favourable position on the SERPs. Several webmasters will make a few fatal mistakes when setting up their site, which can be extremely detrimental to any SEO efforts.

In light of this, here are 10 SEO mistakes you should avoid with WordPress websites.

Not setting your time zone

Publishing regular content, such as blog posts, can do wonders for your SEO performance. However, if you haven’t set the right time zone in WordPress, which is often overlooked by many webmasters, the articles you publish won’t appear when you have scheduled them for.

No Google Analytics goals

You will never know whether your SEO efforts are working or not if you don’t track your results. Therefore, it makes sense to redirect any conversions to a congratulations page, which you can then track using Google Analytics for views and traffic source.

No open graph social meta data

It might not be a ranking signal, but social media can help bring people to your website through clicks. So, make sure you have open graph data activated for Facebook and Twitter Cards activated for Twitter.

No XML sitemap

A XML sitemap will tell Google what is contained within your site and what you want indexed. Therefore, it is an essential part of any SEO strategy. Use the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress to create your sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.

No permalinks to Post name

Always ensure your permalinks include some of the post’s keywords, as this will make the content more user-friendly and play a small part in how the page ranks. Go into Settings> Permalinks and select an option, which for most sites will be Post name.

No anchor text link

Seeing as the name of your business will be in the footer, you might as well link to your homepage from this anchor text. Along with boosting your internal linking strategy, it will also help Google recognise the site through branded anchor text.

No regular content

Not only does regular content give people a reason to visit, it also helps you rank for more keywords and gain more opportunities on Google’s organic search results. Google will reward sites that regularly post high quality content.

No updated content

Whenever someone clicks on your content via Google but then discovers its out of date, they will go back to the search results. Google will take notice and could de-value your content if it isn’t meeting the requirements of users.

While this doesn’t negatively affect rankings, schema markup can have a huge influence on your click-through rate, as this rating system entices users to visit your site instead of a competitor who ranks higher.